A police dog who cried drugs at every traffic stop
reason.com
reason.com
> Instead of birthday cake and ice cream, she got jail food and a bill for hygiene supplies
To spell it out, although she wasn't charged in the criminal sense, she was "charged" financially—for the privilege of experiencing false arrest.
There are other states with extremely messed up legal processes, such as those where not only convicted persons receive a bill for their public defender (which at least makes some sense, logically) but states where you are on hook for thousands of dollars even in the event that you are never tried or you are tried and found not guilty.
You're on the hook for thousands of dollars even if you're never charged!
Don't forget about the bail loan firms. Say, you're arrested and kept on a $20K bail. Even if you have the money in the bank, the only way to pay is by cash or money order. They won't accept personal check, they won't accept wire transfer, they won't accept nothing. You can't buy a money order from your cell. But they will helpfully refer you to a bail loan firm. They take away your phone, so you won't be shopping around much - their referral is all you have. And, unless you happen to have a suitcase full of cash with you, this is the only practical way to pay. Bail loan firms charge 10-15% of the bond, which, of course, they get to keep even if you show up in court as promised, regardless of whether you're found guilty or even charged with anything. This is such a profitable scam those firms will do anything to keep the current system in place.
US justice system is probably more corrupt than some African countries, yet nobody is even talking about it.
Furthermore, that is why public broadcasting is a primary target of populist/far-right campaigns in most other countries too: their propaganda focuses on the unpopular "unjustified" broadcast fees, while they really want to get rid of these largely independent stations, and replace them with commercial competitors that are controlled by media moguls instead of democratic structures.
From my central European perspective, (serious) media are so incredibly important for our society and democracy.
I understand that the USA has somewhat more independent and strong public institutions than us and can rely on them, but still.
Where I live, false or exaggerated headlines are the norm. Scary headlines are lucrative! If we can’t depend on the media to do its job right, then who does that function?
And yes, I know all of the rhetorical defenses for a propagandist media (“no one is perfectly neutral so why bother trying?”, “you have to choose between the progressive narrative and literal Naziism”, etc).
The situation in Hungary has gone really south once there was no strong independent media outlet left. Poland is following a similar path.
You underestimate the power of racism, homophobia and other things that drive some people, plus the feeling of having power over other people (and also, if a crime has been committed, the drive to make culprits out of innocents if police cannot find the real ones).
Sure, the US has some amazingly broken systems that seem to foster endemic corruption, but even without them it’s not enough to guarantee that a police force behaves appropriately (we just had a case in france where at least two people have done 1.5 years and 4 years in detention based on a made-up testimony forced by police officers caught on video, and the police unions and the far-right are still screaming that justice is too lenient and the liberation is a scandal).
No doubt racism is real (especially in the criminal justice system), but it feels like Occam’s Razor would favor the “incentives” argument here.
There is institutional racism in our system. These are laws from long ago, that stick around due to inertia. They end up punishing POC more. When changing these laws comes up for debate, it's not that hooded KKK stand up and protect them, it's that the laws been around for decades. The laws don't affect the majority white population. They are defended uses words like, lazy, poor, criminals, bad part of town...Those words don't tend to bring to mind white middle class people. Then the laws stick around. Or new laws are pass using the same methods.
You don't have to say racist things in the US in order to defend racist laws. There are a myriad of code words you can use instead. Also, many people don't realize just how racist we are as a culture. The Christian church in America has deep racism issues.(read White Too Long by Robert P. Jones)
The US population has been raised by generations of racists so we just literally don't see it anymore. It doesn't affect the majority, so it isn't an issue. Each time a problem is brought up, it's usually dismissed out of hand. We love our victim blaming, our blind eyes, our justifications, and our fear.
Yes, there are massive incentives and money to be made in the criminal justice system. But they only exist because of who they are keeping down. And why don't we care about the ones being kept underfoot?
Obviously financial incentives are a key motivator for many people in forces as well, I was only saying that this can happen even if there is no money to make.
All those scams have to stop being dirty little secrets, there needs to be public outrage built around it.
You need to stop thinking that punishment works. Punishing people, like with dogs, rarely serves any purpose beyond "feeling of justice".
Such "feelings of justice" don't tend to make the world a better place.
I'm no expert, but if you remove perverse incentives and train officers to resolve conflicts without violence, then you'll probably get very far.
Prosecuting police officers is a difficult way to change policing culture.
You need clear guidance about when they have to arrest somebody and when not. And only secondary a system where abuse can be punished.
The purpose of awarding damages for false arrests is to punish malicious false arrests, or mistakes so egregious that we might as well consider them malicious, which some systems are more prone to than others.
Oh, and if you are carrying a suitcase full of cash, expect it to be seized under asset forfeiture laws. Apparently carrying large sums of cash is evidence of criminality.
It's not even large sums of cash, people have had what amounts to a part-time paycheck at minimum wage seized because they made the mistake of having it on their person while they drove a car.
That would definitely not help you.
It's a mess on many many levels.
Plenty of people talk about this. It's a lack of listening that's the problem.
Nice to know African countries are a symbol and the pinnacle of dysfunction and corruption.
That's something at least.
Like the Reagans, the greater society doesn't care about anything unless it affects them. So, they're perfectly fine with degrading, exploitative warehousing and slavery of humans for profit.
On the one hand, the guy definitely did something bad. On the other hand, gee I wonder how generational cycles of poverty, driving future crime rates, happen. No mystery that the effects of criminality seems to afflict entire families when the justice system is actively contributing to that.
And no, it's not like they only got charged that much because they're flush with cash. I'm pretty sure the courts didn't give a damn whether they could afford it (technically, yes they could, but in anything resembling a financially-responsible sense, god no, not at all, they weren't starting from a great spot and it basically ruined them—the bread-winner will now work until he dies or gets so sick he can't anymore)
The entire host of companies people are forced to do business with by court order are like this. Rehab, post conviction monitoring, etc. etc. They're all scum. And they get away with it because nobody will defend criminals.
Every time something like OUI comes up in passing on HN there's be a miles long comment chain where everybody is piling on about how they're terrible people. Sure, fine, they may be, but they also have rights. People like you (probably you reading this very comment) are why ignition interlocks and ankle bracelets can be made that report false positives left and right, the companies that run them can charge stupid amounts of money and get away with it all. Because your principals go out the window as soon as someone is convicted of something you don't like.
Firstly (and depending on jurisdiction), IIDs have to pass fairly rigorous verification in an accredited laboratory before they are accepted for use.
Secondly, all IIDs are regularly (every one to two months) calibrated against ethanol/nitrogen gas certified to a set level, to ensure accuracy. In contrast, police breathalysers are usually calibrated every 6 to 9 months.
Thirdly, all breath alcohol testing devices (IIDs, fuel cell breathalysers, evidential infrared breathalysers) detect ethanol.
This is well and good, but ethanol is also present in miniscule quantities in a vast array of foods and drinks, in addition to beer, wine and spirits.
If someone has consumed these in the past couple of minutes, then takes a test, it will detect the ethanol.
Some examples that people commonly report using in vehicles, which all contain ethanol:
- anything fermented. Kombucha, ginger beer
- fresh bread, pizza, doughnuts [1][2]
- mouthwash, hand sanitiser
- some medications, including asthma medications
These are common everyday items, leading to an ethanol-detecting device detecting ethanol in a substance that contains ethanol. From the user perspective, this is a false positive.
From a technology perspective, this is working exactly as it should be.
Fourthly, alcohol readings caused by mouth contaminants aren't a surprise. Any sane jurisdiction will allow the user to take another test within a few minutes to prove they hadn't ingested alcohol (mouth contaminations will clear from the mouth within a few minutes, whereas ingested alcohol will show another alcohol reading).
To summarise: breath alcohol testing is an established technology with high standards to meet; ethanol is widely prevalent leading to IIDs detecting ethanol; recourse is available to prove the ethanol detected wasn't ingested alcohol.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fermentation [2]: https://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/22237/does-bread...
If only we had some mantra/idiom/whatever the correct word is like "innocent until proven guilty"...
That is a part of it.
"Cops laugh about “probable cause on four legs” but the damage to innocent lives is real."
This is the first sentence in the article. So I think this the mention of innocent until proven guilty is something to talk about concerning the article. The system treats you like a guilty person and stacks the deck against you. I think the plea bargaining that you mention falls into this. I would add that prosecutorial and law enforcement discretion is probably the biggest area of abuse. Because of this, bad laws stay on the book and can be enforced with bias because many people think "oh they wouldn't charge me with that". For example, in my state you can be put in jail for 90 days for your dog getting out of your yard. If it happens twice in one year, it's a misdemeanor. Pretty insane really, but people don't care because it's only enforced sometimes and they don't know how serious it can be.
if the "bad thing" was voluntarily ingesting a chemical that state has no ethical authority to ban a person from ingesting into their own body then I would urge you to reformulate what you consider a "bad thing"
Drug Abuse can lead to all manner of actual crime (theft, Intoxicated Driving, etc) that has a degree of probability to harm OTHERS, this is where the states power can be ethically applies, when a persons actions can directly physically harm another person against that persons will.
However state power should never be considered ethical when they are attempting to "protect people from themselves" this mentality leads to all kinds of abuse by authority and create the very system that causes the issue you highlight
Lifetime ultra heavy pot smokers for example face significant lung cancer risks, though very few people are heavy daily pot smokers for 50+ years at this point.
At the other end, 1 glass of wine every day for 60 years is as far as we can tell on net harmless. Where even light daily pot smoking still causes some lung issues on those timescales. So yes, alcohol in and of it’s self can be deadly but it’s not nearly as bad as these comparisons generally suggest.
This is how you threaten the middle. You threaten their wealth and their careers.
This also reminds me of how some drug companies are pricing gene therapy drugs (like to restore sight, fix muscular dystrophy, etc). They have admitted that they weren't pricing the drug based on what it cost to develop but based on what that person's [function] is worth to them. If your pricing model is based on desperate people being willing to pay anything, then I don't think these executives have thought this through. Desperate people may be willing to pay anything, but when they have nothing to pay, then they are also willing to do anything.
I think this can be a similar situation in the "justice" system. If you have no faith in the system do to their track record of misconduct, mistakes, etc, then you have no incentive to believ in them or try the legitimate path.
I believe this is why high level politicians and the wealthy get out of trouble. They know the system is a sham, so there's no point in going along with it.
That's bog-normal value-based pricing which is used almost everywhere, especially in the software industry. You'll find many, many upvoted blog posts on HN that explain why you should do this.
Now you can certainly argue that this should not be done for medical products, especially those granted a monopoly via patents so that there is no price competition.
But you better have a really good idea of how exactly you're going to prevent it and how you avoid destroying the incentives for doing the (very, very costly) research and clinical trials to create these drugs in the first place.
Please help stop use of the phrase "justice system".
They chose to spend their money to keep their son out of jail. Thats was their choice. That’s the consequence of the son committing what appears to be a major crime. Hopefully the son learns from that and he should be working to help repay that debt.
From a sheer fairness and what is justice actually POV, it's bullshit that this is yet another thing a rich family can shrug off, while a poor family is screwed. I don't have a solution for it, but the role money plays in our justice system may well be the biggest problem with it, which is saying something.
> Hopefully the son learns from that and he should be working to help repay that debt.
Very unlikely, with a record. A decade later and he's doing OK, for values of OK that include "can mostly pay own not-large bills, and only because he's living with his parents, and is steadily and consistently progressing in a low-paying field". Last I checked he's still "in the system" to some extent, as far as ongoing fees and check-ins and such.
(for the record, just to set some parameters here, he didn't physically hurt anyone, but it was still quite serious and definitely not something a society would want to go un-punished, that's absolutely true)
One imagines the long-term lasting harm to all of: victims, families of victims, perpetrators, and families of perpetrators; happening over and over in high-crime neighborhoods and it's no wonder it's so damn hard to improve those areas. That, on top of everything else that's often wrong with them. Reducing, not increasing, the "blast radius" of crime seems like something you'd focus on if you want to reduce crime rates, when stress and poverty are causal for crime and stress and poverty are part of the effect of same "blast radius".
If you think about it, keeping families uneducated and perpetually in debt means more bargaining power for those who have the money to lobby and change the system. What incentive do they have to do that?
Look, some people will always be fuck ups. That’s the sad reality of the life. Some people, no matter how their are guided, will always eventually fuck up and ruin all the hard work people put into them. They are wired to always make poor decisions no matter what. My best friend is like this. After 40 years of trying to help him, I accept him as he is now with no expectations he will ever get better despite decades of trying to help him. I have a close relative like that too. If they are protected from consequences too early in life, they tend to make larger, irrevocable mistakes later in life and then they are fucked for a long time.
In SF crime is running rampant now because of a DA that refuses to prosecute smaller crimes. It has emboldened criminals. Prop 47 has made it so that gangs of thugs enter a store, fill their bags with merchandise and run out with no repercussions. I witnessed this with my own eyes and the manager said they don’t even call the cops anymore because they won’t come. Instead, 15 Walgreens have closed their stores in SF in the last few years because of it. Criminals are arrested 20+ times in the span of a year and they keep getting let go and they are free to continue committing crimes and it’s getting worse and worse.
So punishing criminals matter. Putting them on the right path matters but it can’t be consequence-free.
Especially for drugs, we need to move away from a punishment/vengeance system of justice and towards a rehabilitation/lowest TCO form of treatment.
they're not necessarily worse than jail ofc, but they don't serve any useful therapeutic purpose either
Simple possession shouldn’t be a crime but crimes themselves shouldn’t be consequence-free otherwise it turns a city into a shithole. Look at SF over the last few years.
Ow, wow. That's like 17th century thinking right there, when we used to hang people for petty theft, executions were a public holiday, folks thought it would deter crime but it stayed sky high.
Also boiling people alive was a thing, and, most egregiously, we overboiled them.
I am willing to bet that you or someone in your family or friends has broken some law somewhere at some point, possibly without realising. I don't think this line of thinking leads to a good place.
Even when the "crime" doesn't hurt anybody except the "offender?" GP post strongly implies the charge was some sort of possession charge. Drug addicts do not need to be punished any more than they punish themselves.
I have no idea, though. It would've been better if they gave a little more detail about the nature of the crime.
What's an actual crime to you? I bet our definitions differ based on something not-so-quantifiable. A good DA can produce charges against someone to make it look like an actual crime was committed when it's really something petty or much less nefarious. We've seen countless examples of this.
Rather than describing my sympathies at some nebulous level, I'd rather say this: I have sympathy for those in the criminal justice system because I realize most people are capable of change and that is mostly ignored by the public and the criminal justice system together. Former criminals are almost never rehabbed, and worse we see many examples of folks who were never criminals being introduced to a system that by default does not care about them but carries maximal implications for their life.
I don't know why I should care about if this thief is capable of change or should be rehabbed. I want to kick the shit out of the thief and get the necklace back, because this person has caused so much anguish to me and my family.
But with plea bargain, I bet the number of false positives is somehow elevated.
Also, prisons are a terrible way to handle criminals. Instead of reforming the criminal and helping reintegration into the law-abiding society, many prison systems, including the US's, produce hardened criminals who learned a lot more of criminal trade during incarceration, or crushed people who have no chance to get to their feet again. Unless a society just kills every criminal, it makes sense to care what happens to them, because they'll be back.
Proportionality between crime and punishment is a central pillar of a fair justice system. The extrajudicial financial punishments that the article and the OP allude to, are in direct conflict with that.
Like one of the previous posters said, daemonizing the guilty is what keeps this system from being fixed.
And the K9 dog wasn't even the biggest problem in the police handling. The police just acted in bad faith throughout.
I expected to find just one or two extra screw-ups, but good grief, this is just an orgy of fuck-ups. Granted, this is just one side of the story, and some details can perhaps be contested, but overall it seems fairly solid and reliable to me. Much of this was captured on body cams.
A summary:
- A concerned citizen called the police to make sure everything was okay.
- "Inexplicably, instead of initiating contact with Wendy to see if she was okay, Clark instead called for an ambulance–unnecessarily escalating the welfare check without even checking to see what was going on."
- For some reason this "are you okay?" call expanded to a DUI investigation. Wendy was repeatedly denied to do a chemical test for alcohol or drugs, which she asked for to prove her innocence. Clark insisted on doing a field sobriety test, which was "improperly conducted [..] and improperly instructed Wendy on how to perform the tests", and even more damning "Clark positioned Farris to take the field sobriety tests in a spot ↪where the tests themselves would not be caught on camera"
- She failed this test and was placed under arrest. Again she asks for a breath or blood test (the EMTs were still present, had already checked her out, and decided she was fine). Again denied. At this point she was "in a state of near panic".
- Clark's report didn't mention that Wendy had been awake for 24 hours, had just been awoken, was forced to look out into the bright sunlight to respond to the officer (of course her pupils were constricted), and that she wasn't actually driving the car.
- The dog fails to find anything on the first pass of the car, and near the end of the second pass the dog handler touches the car with the hand that was holding the dog's scent toy. Karma looks at his handler and "finds drugs".
- They discover the $5,000. The car was impounded and "ripped apart in an effort to find drugs" which "permanently damaged Wendy’s vehicle". No drugs were found. She never got paid damaged for this.
- Booked in to jail, according to Clark she refused a breathalyser; "Wendy did not decline, she simply advised the deputy that she had been told not to answer questions until her attorney arrived" (who was on their way, and had wisely advised not to answer questions).
- Finally got her blood test done (results for this take a while, more on this later).
- Cited with a DUI violation. Was booked in on Friday and released on Monday (doesn't mention times).
- On Monday the prosecutor dropped the charges as there's no real probably cause.
- The same day Wendy returned to complain about Clark's handling, and "In retaliation, Clark submitted the DUI arrest to the State of Washington Department of Licensing for an administrative decision on Wendy’s license. Wendy had no idea Clark had done this". The paperwork Clark submitted for this claimed that Wendy refused to do a breathalyzer.
- Wendy’s driving privileges were suspended for a year and was required to get SR-22 insurance, which she can't afford. "As a result, Wendy has not driven since she discovered her license was suspended" and "as a result of unjustifiable suspension of her license, Wendy lost job opportunities".
- Wendy was charged again for DUI based on Clark's lie that she had refused to take to a breathalyzer. She had to travel from Montana to Washington only to have the case dismissed again.
- To prove her innocence she tried to get the blood test results, but according to the police office the "lab was busy" and the results weren't ready yet. In May 2020 she contacted the lab directly, and they informed her that the tests had been completed and submitted to the police office on March 27th, 2019.
- She never heard about the complaint she submitted against Clark. Seems to have been >/dev/null'd.
[1]: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.waed.91...
Batman is a fictional character but sometimes he seems like our only solution to these kinds of problems. Just do the right thing regardless of the consequences.
This has nothing to do with government bureaucracy, and everything to do with malicious, criminal cops. Don't confuse one for the other.
They suffer no consequences for harassing and abusing people. Frequently they even get away with murder. The cities and their unions protect them, because they know that at the core the police are a criminal enforcer organization. The law protects the rights of the poor and innocent in the USA, but the police are tasked by landowners with a lot more than simply enforcing the law: they want them to enforce the social order, too, which is a much more, err, "informal" process, such as we see here.
This results in a culture of lawlessness in the police, as they carry out the wishes of those who write the checks and suffer no consequences for breaking the law which they exist ostensibly (but not in practice) to uphold.
I've written about this before: https://sneak.berlin/20200628/the-problem-with-police-in-ame...
This has everything to do with government (or otherwise, bigCo is not immune to this) bureaucracy.
Diffusion of responsibility, conflicting process, etc. etc. are how this kind of behavior can persist. These cops can do this crap and remain employed because the pile of bureaucratic process that distills everything down to (mostly) objectively evaluate metrics and therefore "doing your job while being a dick" doesn't negatively affect them.
It isn't just police that have this problem. Every regulatory enforcement agency has this problem to various extents.
I don't tend to stay angry for very long. Actually, I pretty much never do. But it's hard to describe the amount of anger one can feel when being the victim of such a blatant bad faith injustice. I never thought I was capable of this, but turns out I am. These people tried to charge me for fixing cracks in the walls because the building had subsided. Yes, really. They literally admitted in the email that they knew this was illegal but were going to try it anyway (and there's a lot more bad faith bullshit in similar fashion). Eventually I got the £2,800 charge down to £800-something after filling a dispute. There was still a bunch of outright bullshit in there (about £200 at the most was justified), but is those £600 worth it?
If you can afford it: probably not. Aside from the time you need to spend on it you just get consumed by anger and negativity. It's not healthy for me, so I just moved on and tried to forget about it. I still get angry when thinking about it though; what bunch of morally bankrupt tosspots.
I've seen this with other people as well; years ago one of my coworkers had a similar conflict with his garage. I don't even know if he was right, but he certainly had the same feeling as I had. He did go to court for it (I don't recall the outcome) and he spent months talking about it to anyone who wanted to listen, including customers (many customers). I don't think it was good for him.
Ideally, government should be better than some random company. But in reality, government and companies are both organisations comprised of the same sort of people, and people can be rather ugly and unreasonable.
I do think you can minimize these sort of things by fostering a good organisational culture, which is easier said than done of course. You will always have some problems, but a lot of the truly outrageously bad problems seem to stem from a toxic culture: the culture at my rental agency, or the culture at the police in the US, or stuff like the toxic culture at the Dutch tax service leading to the recent/on-going scandal regarding false allegations of fraud and ignoring of evidence there was actually no fraud.[2]
[1]: They also evicted me over this, turns out that calling your landlord a cunt over entering your house without ringing the doorbell is not a good idea in a country with minimal protections for renters, even though it was quite justified considering it's 100% unacceptable and illegal and I had already told them many times I didn't want it.
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_scand...
After an arrest, police will often ignore exonerating evidence or not bother trying to get it, for much the same reasons. And they have a whole arsenal of tactics for making life a pain in the ass for the accused while they fight to get rid of bogus charges.
And after all that, they make filing a complaint as difficult as possible, after which the complaint either disappears entirely or seemingly sits in a drawer for months to years before ending in a generic finding of no wrongdoing from the officer.
As far as the police are concerned, the system is working as intended. Politicians may disagree, but they're too scared to make serious changes, so it never changes.
This is what we get when we over-rely on armed agents and the legal system to fix far too many societal issues. That’s a result of too many fear-possessed people simply voting their fears.
I don't know what you would call it, but I don't think "justice" should be part of its name.
They never really close the file.
Ann Arbor Michigan had the most liberal cannabis laws in the United States for a couple decades running, it was a $5 fine for personal use quantities.
In the late 80s (IIRC) a Republican on the city council tried to change this, campaign promise or something. The council said "hmm, yeah, it costs us more to process this paperwork than we get in fines" and raised it to $20 or $25.
Legalise it and tax it folks.
Can't we just enforce the law equally without fear or favour?
The nonsense that is "democratically" voted for in elections where a handful of interested parties vote for it and no one else knows it happens is astonishing. Especially for judges and infrastructure bonds.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/its-too-dangerous-to-elect-pro...
If you did allow the other branches to appoint judges, the bench would obviously become stuffed based on who's currently in power.
But another 30-40% of Americans believe cop movies/TV and think cops need to be able to shoot first and ask questions later 'cause of armies of "bad guys" armed with machine guns.
Unfortunately I will be surprised if a great many of the "reform the police" advocates stick around after it becomes apparent that "reducing police power" likely means some amount of "reducing the number of criminal infractions", "reducing staffing/resource allocations" and "reducing police's ability to screw people at their discretion" and that will greatly reduce their ability to call the cops and get a response to minor nuisance behavior. Unfortunately people really like using state violence as a cudgel against whatever they don't like.
I've been bitching about the cops for decades. Things have changed a lot since BLM came onto the scene and getting cops/government to generally treat people fairly and with dignity/respect after interactions have started (which seems to be the avenue where most progress is being made) would be a massive win but I see a lot of pitfalls that need to be avoided on the way there.
https://nndda.org/the-double-blind-attack/
>While the scientific community highly endorses double-blind testing, it can have disastrous effects on canine teams. As there is no way to determine whether the canine responded correctly at the time of the alert, the question is, should the handler reward the canine? This is a vital question due to the fact that detection canines are largely trained on a fixed ratio reward system where the canine is rewarded immediately for almost every correct response.
Also we live in a world where instantaneous communication at arbitrary locations is possible. How hard would it be to make an app where the evaluator can check if the canine's response warrants a treat?
It's an absolute shit show that only cares about money. I was even told by a civil rights lawyer that we had a case, but that the judges don't care unless we sustained substantial monetary loss (more than the $2k plus of handling the case pro se).
Law enforcement agencies across the US still use lie detector tests, despite their efficacy having been determined many decades ago to be exactly nil.
DNA evidence is infallible they say, yet an entire state( NY) screwed up their test procedures to such a degree that they are essentially trash. The system knew this, yet proceeded to use those tests because telling the truth was deemed too costly. They deemed it better to send possibly innocent people to jail than admit their mistake.
Fingerprints are another area where law enforcement regularly screws up. They try to glean useful information from a partial print, in many cases so partial as to be laughable. I know of two cases where someone was arrested for a crime, even after having soundly proven they were not in the same state and even in the country at the time of the crime.
Further, most of the tools in an arson investigator's toolkit are no better than using a divining rod to find water, yet they are accepted by the courts as valid.
There are tens of thousands of cases where prosecutors proceeded with pressing charges in the face of overwhelming evidence to a suspect's innocence.
The police are given tools that they do not understand, nor care to understand, and cannot employ with any reasonable amount accuracy.
The courts nearly universally side with the police on these matters.
These are simply facts, and should make everyone's hair stand on end, because the police are using what amounts to voodoo to determine the guilt of a suspect, and the courts go along with it.
Never mind that the government itself still uses them as part of their security clearance process...
If you read the article you will find a description that the dog didn't alert the first time around the car, didn't alert the second time around the car, and only alerted after the cop maliciously signaled to the dog that they want an alert. To me that doesn't sound like a bad dog, it sounds like a bad cop.
These are concerning false positive rates, but I don't think anything in the article suggests the extent of what the parent wrote, in a universal sense:
>They're basically a rubber-stamp. Dogs want to please their handlers. If the handler wants the dog to alert, the dog will alert. The presence or absence of drugs isn't relevant to the dog.
26% of searches initiated by a drug dog led to drugs being found.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2011-01-06-ct-met...
44% here.
The obvious solution is to train the dog to search things that you know have drugs (or don't) because the trainer set it up that way. You'll need to then repeat this training often, and not always in the same environment. If you don't, eventually the dog will figure out that it will always be rewarded for alerting in the field.
The problem with this, of course, is that it's expensive and cumbersome to do. You need to set up cars/bags/lockers/etc with and without drugs in them in a variety of locations, secure them (lest actual criminals steal the drugs), and bring the dogs to them (lots of time out of the handler's day). Also, even if you do this, you'll still get false positives: dogs are living animals, not machines.
dogs are also experts at picking up on non verbal body language and cues, whether you're intentionally giving them off or not.
If we ever make fuzzy happy fun killbot, I think civil rights might be doomed because there'll be an army of killbot fans who will defend them even if they run internally on an API call to random.org
At least that's what happened when I was K9 nonconsent searched.
The dog didn't signal for 4 laps and then the handler looked at him like i look at my dog when he eats cat food. Of course the dog then sat.
When I let him out at night, I give him a treat when he comes back in after doing his business outside.
Then he got smart enough to scratch at the door to go out again, then came right back in and sat by the cabinet to wait for his treat. Finally he gave up on the extra treats when he found it didn't work.
Dogs are very good at figuring out the actions they need to do to get a reward.
A clue to the dog about as subtle as a brick in the face. The best possible good faith interpretation I can give to this is spectacular ignorance in understanding how dogs work.
A huge proportion of popular forensic techniques are BS, including "psychological profiling" that has been glorified on many TV shows.
The answer is no, I'm not (at least in theory; there are so many exceptions that you really are).
Moreover, you're not required to enter "other people's (or govt) property". Kids are required to go to school.
The reality is that students have been shafted by the Supreme Court ignoring what the Constitution says.
https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu&q=lor...
Am I surprised that he would intentionally choose to use a method like this, that guarantees a search? Absolutely not.
In the 2020 WA state governor election he ran on a very hard right platform. My personal opinion is that he knew he didn't have much chance of winning, due to population balance on the west side of the state, so he decided to double down on all the things his hard-core supporters loved most.
And that link doesn't help either: it's just a picture of the guy and a bunch of links to his twitter and some bland news headlines about his political run. No smoking gun that I can see.
And then, after he lost the election by a very wide margin, followed the example of Trump by spouting baseless conspiracy theories that the election was a giant fraud and stolen from him, despite no evidence of such appearing.
Is that problematic enough for you?
https://www.kxly.com/hundreds-defy-covid-19-restrictions-to-...
https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2020/oct/07/inslee-culp-sp...
I don't think this snarkyness is warranted. Your parent poster didn't argue against your claim, they simply asked you to present a coherent claim with references.
> People tend to react in a less that perfectly polite manner when being called "lazy"
Parent poster didn't call you (as a person) lazy. They called the wording you chose as lazy. FWIW, I agree with that characterization. It's lazy to just call people "problematic" without bothering to specify what is problematic about them (which you have since done in a subsequent post).
Dog sniff tests like lie detectors should just be forbidden from being used in any capacity like every other pseudo scientific instrument.
The problem is that dogs have evolved to please humans and humans are very biased.
But the only thing they had to suspect Wendy Farris of was being a responsible motorist in stopping when too tired to drive safely. Maybe a breathalyser test could be warranted just to be safe, and if passed apologise for wasting her time.
It sounds like the officers were either running a scam or were just looking for people to harass as make-work. “Field sobriety test”, what is that even? Sounds like a total scam.
IMO the bigger scam is the number of baseless infractions that cops can use to pull you over in the first place. If a cop wants to pull you over, they can find a reason if they follow you for a few minutes.
This seems like an overreaction. Surely we'd want an explosives sniffing dog walking around at the Boston Marathon, for example. There is abuse when bad cops use $TOOL, but that doesn't mean that there are no legitimate uses for $TOOL. The proper fix is to create a legal and social culture in which government officials of any kind are held to a high moral standard.
It's not like dogs are machines, even small amount of unstructured positive and negative reinforcement can distract a dog from what it was trained to do.
If the Americans manage to clear up this category error, they won’t want to use these defective dogs any more than they’d want to use a dim torch or a cracked magnifying glass.
The phrase is more commonly translated as: "Who will watch the watchers"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%...
I mean, "yes, I consent to an easily corrupted dog search?"
People dislike black-box ML and "algorithms", but the approach seems miles ahead of Woof Woof I Smell Drugs as a Service.
This is absolutely true if the only relevant threat in your model is law enforcement action.
In cases where that isn’t the right threat model, the issue is more complex.
The simplest case is when you wee the obvious target of the past crime the police are investigating and it might recur or escalate, hence why people who don’t have a particular expectation of police animus tend to report crimes and freely cooperate with police in investigating them.
But this can be true even where you aren’t the obvious past victim.
That's all I need to know to feel strongly that dogs should not be used to establish probable cause.
I consider 95% to be highly accurate and reasonably acceptable, which is what I'd want in a drug dog. But I have no knowledge of what it should be, I'm not a dog expert. That's who I'd ask when making the determination of accuracy %. If it's anything less than 95%, though, I'd remove dogs completely.
95% is not highly accurate, it is arbitrary.
The point of my comment is that there should be a standard at which the dogs have to meet.
They preferred a 2014 study from Poland, which eliminated the potential for false positives. Rather than simulating real-world conditions, researchers ensured that every test included measurable quantities of narcotics.
This study's design seems malicious, you don't even need to be a data scientist, but merely have a tiny bit of curiosity, to at least wonder how does it do on tests without narcotics and include it in the test.
>He discovered this artifact in the research methodology, wherein the horse was responding directly to involuntary cues in the body language of the human trainer, who was entirely unaware that he was providing such cues.
Drug dogs are an end run around probable cause (as the article states). Modern policing is rotten to the core and needs to be abolished. An entirely different system needs to replace it, a system more focused on helping people instead of terrorizing the vulnerable.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMCSd9ZNL0nshOhXwtfIJBA
All this is emboldened by the drug war. If it wasn't for that, most of these police departments would be well overstaffed (if they aren't considered that already). The US justice system is a farce.
As technology oriented website users, I think it's likely most of us are familiar with Joel Spolsky's advice to never do a big rewrite [0].
Regardless of the faults of current policing practices, the fact is that they represent centuries of judicial, legislative, and social work by many thousands of individuals. It is dishonest and absurd to believe that such a system can be adequately replaced by "something new I dunno lol". Cultures and traditions embody solutions to problems you don't know exist. "Cultural revolutions" have always and everywhere exposed the gaping wounds of the past and revived ancient problems that were once solved.
The difficult and tedious work of persistent mutations and small improvements is historically the most reliable method to improve the lot of humanity. But it's not as exciting or sexy as "burn it all down" rhetoric, and people do want to get laid.
[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
>But it's not as exciting or sexy as "burn it all down" rhetoric
He stated "modern policing," which I would guess is since the 1980s and the drug war, then 9/11. All this is fairly new, and started within my lifetime. This is "normal" to the younger generation, but it's horrifies me.
Some simple fixes that don't require "burning it to the ground," but would in fact abolish modern policing:
1. Abolish qualified immunity. 2. Civil forfeiture requires burden of proof on the state. 3. Require at least the military's rules of engagement, police rules are very lax. (I'm scared, BANG BANG). 4. Require body cams and remove ability to turn them or the microphone off. (sensitive info can be removed on FOIA, but not court cases). 5. Prosecute prosecutors for gross prosecutorial misconduct resulting in a wrongful conviction (withholding exonerating evidence). 6. Disallow drug dog alerts as evidence of a crime. (this has more than been disproven as reliable.) 7. Require states to provide equal funding for the public defender's office as they do the district attorney's office. (fair representation). 8. Require all police departments be 100% funded by their municipality rather than self funding (ticket quotas, pre-textual stops w/ civil forfeiture). 9. National police certification. This keeps away the bad "gypsy" cops that get fired / resign for gross misconduct from being hired elsewhere. 10. Successful lawsuits against the city for police misconduct get taken out of the police budget.
There are probably more, but those should "abolish modern policing." A civilization has to have a pretty ironclad faith in their legal system, otherwise everything will collapse.
Yup, the US incarceration rate started rising to these insane current day levels around the 1980s [0]
Interestingly enough, the incarceration rate kept rising even while crime was going down, but crime going down wasn't a US exclusive phenomena, Canada saw the same trend without mass incarcerating people. [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...
I do believe that the zeitgeist that wants to abolish or defund the police does genuinely mean that they do not want the police to exist in any capacity. They mean abolish in the sense that the asylum system was abolished.
I think that idea / narrative makes it easy to circumvent any reasonable discussion on the topic in the political / media sphere.
I think we're nearly at a critical point, if not already. The police were so brazen to beat up and gas news people covering protests, while being filmed doing it.
I'm not a big fan of Vox, but here's a fairly comprehensive article (with video) of what went on.
https://www.vox.com/identities/2020/5/31/21276013/police-tar...
To use a bit of rhetoric, this doesn't look like policing, this looks like occupation.
1. When they pull you over: Why did you pull me over?
2. When they ask you questions: I’m not talking about my day
3. If they keep asking questions: Am I being detained or free to go?
4. If you are detained or arrested: I plead the fifth
5. Stop speaking [0]
The supreme court decided that a traffic stop is just that, it’s not a license to hold someone on the side of the road and wait for a drug dog beyond the time it actually takes for the traffic stop + ticket. If there is probable cause / reasonable suspicion, vague but important concepts, the officer will not need a drug dog to search your car. But if you fail to assert your rights you may unintentionally consent to wait around for a dog you have no responsibility to wait for.
This won’t stop you from having your rights violated in the moment, but failing to assert your rights (or worse, waiving them) will ensure that you don’t have them later in court if that’s where things head.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/ajherrington/2021/01/22/the-onl...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE
Regent Law Professor James Duane gives viewers startling reasons why they should always exercise their 5th Amendment rights when questioned by government officials
If you're driving a shitbox in a nice neighborhood and get pulled over for an obvious fishing stop or if you're pulled over for some legitimate infraction it's generally a good idea to roll with whatever their pretense is, give them some bullshit smalltalk answer about where you're going and draw a firm "I do not consent to any search" line if they push the issue.
Cops are incentivized to varying degrees based on department and time of month to write tons of tickets and/or go fishing. You don't wanna start the stop off on the wrong foot by being that "am I being detained" jerk right from the get go. You should not give up your rights but it's not generally helpful to assert that you know them until they probe to see whether you do. By asserting your rights before you have been challenged you're escalating the stop. It might work out for you, but maybe the K9 guy is an asshole and the cop wants to make him drag his ass across town for no good reason. Don't be his reason.
Cops deal with tons of stops and there's a range of what's typical. Your job is to act and answer questions in a way that gets you labeled as typical in the cops mind causing him to make the stop progress in a typical manner without any extra fanfare (like the whole drug dog routine). Once a stop is on track to go a certain way it's very hard to get off that track. So do your best to get the stop onto the track where all the cop has to do is checks your papers and giving you a warning or ticket.
Right, that's why it's step 3 and not step 1
> It might work out for you, but maybe the K9 guy is an asshole and the cop wants to make him drag his ass across town for no good reason. Don't be his reason.
You are missing the point by a mile: K9 searches are voluntary. If a cop feels they have a reason to arrest you they will just arrest you. If they feel they have enough evidence to search your car they'll just search it.
For example, the cop in this story acted unethically even though the person in question complied.
Links: https://www.nlg.org/defunding-the-police/ https://www.aclu.org/news/criminal-law-reform/reimagining-th...
None of this could be justified without the war on drugs. Plus we'd get rid of the prime motivator for a lot of the world's crime.
- drug analysis
- DNA segment matching
- digital forensics
- lineup identifications
- police sketches
This isn't to say that policing in its current form isn't effective at all, but the media (whether intentionally or not) have done an excellent job as the propaganda department for the police.
Why improve when everyone believes you're superman?
but the media (whether intentionally or not) have done an excellent job as the propaganda department for the police.
Personally I say "no way is this anything but intentional". There's way too much pro-cop, pro-military-industrial-complex, pro-sook-agency crap on TV for it to be just accidental. Propaganda is exactly what it is.
> In Hollywood, many movie productions are directly supervised by the Department of Defense's (DoD's) Film Liason Unit. Directors looking to borrow Army material for their movies need to apply to the DoD, and submit their movies' scripts for vetting. Ultimately, the DoD has a say in virtually every US-made movie that use military resources in their production.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/opinions/2016/10/24/how-po...
If you're buddy-buddy with the cops, they'll help promote you, talk to you about cool cases they worked, etc.. If you're instead critical of the cops, they're going to try and undermine you instead.
This means that doing a cop show that's anti-cop would be like doing a medical show without ever being able to consult a doctor. You can do it, but you're going to have to put a lot more work into research to get the same sense of verisimilitude.
You know how people who don't work in government don't realize Parks and Rec is a documentary?
And people who don't work in a white collar office don't realize The Office is also a documentary?
Well Brooklyn Nine-Nine is a documentary too.
The primary artistic liberty these shows take is to take a decade's worth of shenanigans, compress it into one season and cut out all the drudgery in-between. Basically all the stupid "that would never happen" crap happens but spread out over 100x as long and 10x as many people.
I don't think it's an organized effort merely to promote law enforcement from a political standpoint.
Rather, I think such shows are made because they sell well to two crowds: the pro law enforcement crowd and those with a curiosity for true crime.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/194213/crime-clearance-r...
your local government may keep stats E.G.: https://www.cabq.gov/police/public-reports/annual-reports/un... , https://staging.policescorecard.org/ (or the extremely hard to navigate FBI's UCR page https://www.fbi.gov/services/cjis/ucr/ )
It's remarkable that pseudoscience is a big part of how we (don't) protect our rights.
To rant for a second, it seems like a case of what I encounter at work too often as a data scientist. It drives me nuts. There's some statistical fallacy where lay people infer one thing, while the logical inference is something else for some subtle reason, and they respond to the critique with, 'well, yeah but we don't need a super rigorous answer here,' or something along those lines. As if a wrong answer is more correct when you 'don't need rigor.'
I think we're in that boat because people so easily mistake approximate correctness in the sense of 'this answer is very nearly the right answer' with approximate correctness in the sense of 'this reasoning is very close to the right reasoning.' The two are interchangeable often enough to create the bad habit, like if you discard an assumption that is very probably true enough, or discard a term that is small. But when they aren't interchangeable, they're really really not interchangeable.
(We're also in that boat because enough people cry wolf about rigor in the other direction, like complaining about discarding an error term that really is small enough to safely/rigorously discard)
Unfortunately, there have been multiple cases where it turns out the forensic analysis simply wasn't performed, the technician just put whatever the prosecutor wanted to see on the form.
Easy way around this is double-blinding the evidence. The fact that this isn't done should make DNA evidence inadmissible in court until the relevant authorities clean up their act.
Oh and the false positive rate is so high and it's practically same with coin toss.
>But was wrong in more than 40 percent of cases. Sella, a drug detection dog in Florida, gave false alerts 53 percent of the time. Bono, a drug detection dog in Virginia, incorrectly indicated the presence of drugs 74 percent of the time.
Otherwise why would the officers even put up with a dog that’s clearly just wasting their time and preventing them for doing their jobs? Why would they go out of their way to rig the training procedures to make their real jobs harder? Put the racketeers and perjurers behind bars where they belong and the dog reliability problem will solve itself.
This is not meant as a snarky comment but the negatives you listed are the actual reasons US police use them. It makes their jobs easier. They don't care about justice in the end.
I train & handle drug sniffer dogs for the Navy. Once spent several days turning over a battleship from top to bottom after the dog kept giving clear sign. Truth is I'd realised a couple of hours in I'd brought the explosives dog by mistake but it'd gone too far by then
Hopefully it's just a matter of time before we can replace owner-pleasing dogs with something that won't give a false positive in order to get a pat on the head and a treat.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/10/magazine/how-a-2-roadside...
One reason dogs are unlikely to be replaced by a device is precisely because 1) dogs are opaque instruments not readily susceptible to critical analysis, and 2) have long been given the benefit of a doubt--much like cops' famed mind-reading faculties. From the perspective of the police, it's a don't break what isn't broken situation.
NB: The most optimistic reason for this correlation would be: 'Drug possession' correlates with 'drug use' correlates with 'driving while impaired' correlates with 'driving in a way that gets you pulled over'.
That is more or less exactly what the article says, yes.
The article gets it wrong, this is the idea.
"It was widely used in the Middle East, and may have led to numerous deadly bombings in Iraq due to its inability to detect explosives. Its inventor, James McCormick, was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2013 for fraud. "
Longer form article: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/06/fake-bomb-detectors-...
> Lex, a drug detection dog in Illinois, alerted for narcotics 93 percent of the time during roadside sniffs, but was wrong in more than 40 percent of cases.
That means that the dog was right 60 percent of the time or that 55.8 percent of the people stopped actually had drugs in the car. Unless I am missing something.
This is pretty much par for the course in a state divided by both a mountain range and political ideology but what was unusual is that along with Trump Culp promoted the big lie that Trump had only lost the election because of rampant cheating and rolled Washington State into this perverse narrative with a side order of immigrant hate by making them the villains that stole WA from both Trump and Culp.
According to Culp he and Trump were the proper inheritors of power in Washington and the nation. He even promised to uncover and reverse the fraud through lawsuits although he lacked the money to go through the show of reclaiming his "rightful place" via lawsuit he still fund raised off it as if he was going to and his fan club crowed about how great it would be when our actual governor was perp walked to depending on whom you asked prison or execution for treason.
He is a disease right up their with the eastern Washington congressman Matt Shea whom we somehow just recently got rid of who published a paper on the biblical basis for war wherein it discussed the creation of an ISIS like biblical state following the fall of America in which wrong thinking women would be subjugated and wrong thinking men would simply be murdered.
From Matt Sheas writing
Under one heading, “Rules of War,” it makes a chilling prescription for enemies who flout “biblical law.” It states, “If they do not yield – kill all males.”
https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2018/oct/26/rep-matt-shea-...
Even in our relatively liberal states the right is breeding ideologues, traitors, and terrorists who make real and solid the claims and fears that proponents of the red scare imagined. It turns out their fan fiction was written while looking into a mirror.
It makes sense that even if you had less Culp voters proportionally if you look at over half the state you will find more people in absolute numbers. Your cherry picked absolute numbers are less functional than looking at proportions.
Lets go to the map!
https://www.politico.com/2020-election/results/washington/
2020 Election Results By County:
King: Biden 75.4% Trump: 22.4%
Pierce: Biden 54.2% Trump: 42.9%
Snohomish: Biden 58.9% Trump 38.2%
Eastern WA
Stevens: Biden 27.7% Trump 70%
Douglas: Biden 36.9% Trump 61.2%
Spokane: Biden 46.3% Trump 50.7%
Through most of Eastern WA Trump got 60-70% of the vote in a state where overall he got 39% of the vote. The division is extremely clear.
In case its not lets look at Culps race.
https://www.politico.com/2020-election/results/washington/go...
King: Inslee 74.3% Culp 25.7%
Spokane: Inslee 45% Culp 55%
Stevens: Inslee 26.1% Culp 73.9
If Eastern WA was its own state it would be as Red as Tennessee. If Western WA was its own state it would be bluer than California.
> This is to say he lost by a city not a country mile because he was very popular in Eastern WA where around 25% of the population lives but a dud elsewhere.
He very much did not lose by a city vs a country mile because of 21% of the vote that went 65-35. The race was close-ish because 1.2 million Western WA residents voted for him
https://wsdot.wa.gov/sites/default/files/2017/07/24/Env-Wet-...
Just did a quick back of the envelope tabulation and I get about 2 million for Biden vs 1.1 million for Trump in western WA which means that Biden got about 65% of the vote in western WA which is a larger percentage than Biden got in CA as a whole.
Dismissing the problem with facile insults degrades the dialogue and avoids dealing with the actual problems that face us which isn't as simple as saying hurr hurr you're stupid.
The Republicans have been presenting themselves as the party of white identity for decades at the expense of support from anyone other than Bob the white man. They are now incapable of pivoting to a broader platform without losing Bob. Favoring the bird in the hand they have begun selling bob on the Fable that nonwhites are stealing their country in hopes that they can pass repressive enough measures to stay in power for a few more years or even end democracy itself if that is what it takes. The majority of Republicans would rather lose democracy than lose their country, as they see it, to brown people and colorblind white folks.
The simple fact is Republican support with nonwhites being what it is and our nations racial demographics trajectory being what it is loss is inevitable. By the 2040s America will be only 49% white and someone who does only as well as Ronald Reagan will only lose as bad as Mondale did to Reagan. If you project their performance with whites and non-whites into 2040s demographics this is true for every Republican since Reagan.
The propaganda that has been increasingly effectively pushed on the right since the dawn of social media is a show to cover their incipient and growing weakness and as loss looms closer it stands to grow and the situation stands to grow more volatile. Standing on one side and screeching is an ineffective solution when what we need is a large enough critical mass of sane people on the opposing side keep things straight. In service of this we do need to together call a spade a spade. Eastern WA like the rest of team red is on the crazy train.
Its great and all that you deal with less property crime and bums in small town America but I'd rather deal with bums and vandalism than in the ISIS like ethnostate Shea would like to enact or the Dystopian post Democracy wonderland people like Culp fervently supported where either the courts or the military fills in democracies death certificate and gives its goods and titles to a fascist pretender.
The same people you see as fit stewards of their small towns and cities are unfit to run nations because literally every time they do they botch the job.
It really does seem that the dog is used as an excuse when the police already wanted to check a vehicle.
It seems the whole thing is a charade.
That seems kind of unfair.
Wow - ignoring the point of the article, that still means police officers were pulling over people to search at better than 1 in 2. Cops were good enough to look at a car and get it right that often. I mean what are the odds of randomly pulling a car and getting drugs in it? 50:1? 20? 100?
It does not matter if the dog is any good or not, the cop is.
(plus if you can find out what "tells" the cop is using, you can stop giving off the tells - unless its really dumb like clouds of sweet smelling smoke pouring out of the windows)
Edit: Or do you mean the cops pull over lots of cars, and then only sometimes decide to use the dog? Well, the same applies, only this time its less impressive as the cop gets to lean in the window, look over the occupants etc etc. But still, a 50/50 decision to call in the dog is a very high hit rate.
When a decision is taken to use that dog (no matter who or where), the decision was 'right' 1 in 2 times. This is way better than random searches of a car population.
Or how about that starting in 4th grade we had D.A.R.E., where they regularly bring in actual cops to teach a "class" during which they attempt to coerce students into snitching on their families? This is when they're not busy teaching us about drugs that 95% of the students had never even heard of.
How about that it's very common for the police, if they find someone with a larger amount of drugs, to rob them rather than arrest them? This happens all the time with cops learning the license plates of particular dealers, although most drug dealers that I know have preferred this eventuality even if they lost a larger amount. Another friend lost 2 pounds of weed and a lot of money over a random noise complaint.
These American institutions, the schools and the cops in this case, are a total failure and need to be completely reworked.